He stood within five feet of Aderhold. He had moved so that the table was no longer between them. In doing so, the attitude of advantage and mastership had been lost. The two stood on a level floor, with no conventional judgement bar between them. If in Carthew, beneath murk and tempest, there appeared for the moment something basic, justified, and ultimate, in Aderhold no less character unveiled its mass. He stood in chains, but they seemed ribbons of mist. It was he that was metal and real, and with a sudden loom and resistive force sent back, broken, doubts and fantastic violences of thought and ascription. Though for a short time only, yet for that time, the tattered farrago of superstitions, hanging in Carthew’s mind like mouldering banners of wars whose very reason was forgot, shrunk and shrivelled until they seemed but featureless dust. For a time he ceased, standing here, to believe in Aderhold’s attendance at sabbats, brewings of poison from baleful herbs, toads, spiders, and newts, and midnight conspirings in the interests of the Kingdom of Satan. Even the acknowledged, monstrous sin, the extravagant, the unpardonable, the monarch and includer of all—even the enormity of Unbelief—wavered in his mind, grew unsubstantial. There was a fact of great force before him, a mass, a reality.... But if, for one larger, saner moment, he rejected belief in a supernatural bond of evil linking together Aderhold and Joan Heron, he by no means did this with the possibility of other bonds—evil also if they existed between these two—evil to him as wormwood, darkness, and madness!
“In particular,” he said, in a voice that thickened as he went on, “I am told that they have taken Joan Heron. I had never thought of that—of her coming under suspicion.... I had never thought of that. I do not yet believe her to be a witch—though indeed they bring all manner of accusation and proof against her—but I will not yet believe it.... But I will have from thee what has been thy power over her! Tell me that, thou atheist!”
“My power over her has been naught and is naught. I have spoken with her seldomer than I have spoken with you. I have had no association with her. Why she should be in this gaol I know not.”
“It is proved that the morning after you were lodged here she came into this square, and stood before this prison, making signs.”
“I know naught of that. What does she say herself?”
“She says that she had walked to the castle to see one there, and coming back, paused but a moment in the square. She says she made no signs.”
“And is it so hard to believe what she says?”
Carthew drew a heavy and struggling breath. “There is a passion, I think, that teacheth all human beings to lie.... It is said, and loudly, that you came to Heron’s cottage by night, and that she went to the Oak Grange by night, and that you were paramours.”
“It is false. I neither went so to Heron’s cottage nor did she come so to the Grange, nor were we paramours.”
“That day I found you together in Hawthorn Wood—”